


Time and Tide

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Canon character deaths, M/M, Selkies, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 22:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4978987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah Rogers smiled, and ran her thin fingers through Bucky’s perfect hair. Bucky stilled, and Steve had the feeling that no one tended to touch the Barnes children besides each other. “The sea is never fair, lad,” she said, sad but certain, and Bucky swallowed hard and looked away. “But she takes what’s hers, in the end.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time and Tide

**Author's Note:**

> Not that this isn't canon-divergent anyway, given the selkies, but it ends in a way that is true to Steve and Bucky's comic-book plane crash and not to the MCU train in the Alps.
> 
> Glossary explanation for name choices at the end. Original tumblr post [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/130959105843/foxfireflamequeen-replied-to-your-post-excellent).

 Maureen Barnes had dark brown eyes, dark enough to hide the black of her pupils from view, limpid, as if she were always on the verge of tears.  She ran her home as well as any other mother on Steve’s block, sent her four children out with errands and wet laundry to hang, with casseroles or bread with honey for families in need.

That was how Steve met Bucky, one afternoon when he was home recuperating from the measles, his Ma covering another nurse’s shift at the ward so that they would have enough money to make rent.  A dark-haired, dark-eyed boy knocked softly on the door, and - even exhausted and woozy from pain - Steve knew it had to be a Barnes.

The Barnes children (all four of them, Rebecca, James, Alice and Nonie, two sets of Irish twins, the eldest ten and the youngest not quite seven) were the talk of the neighborhood, women crowded around Sarah Rogers’s table with cake and coffee, lauding Becky Barnes’s perfect, pale skin or Nonie’s wide-set eyes with an edge of jealousy that they didn’t think little Steven could hear.  All four kids had their mother’s brown, liquid eyes and pale skin, heart-shaped faces surrounded by waves of dark hair that never fell out of place, no matter how rainy or humid the day.

“Where’s your mother?” James had asked, after handing over the jar of honey and inviting himself in to brew tea with what looked like floating green weeds.

“Work,” Steve croaked, grimacing at the briny taste of the tea, but gulping it down obediently under this boy’s bright but chary gaze.

Which was how Steve had met the rest of the Barnes clan, when James— _Bucky_ , he insisted, only his Da called him James—dragged him home for a warm meal and some company.

“Welcome to the rookery,” Becky grinned, her hair pulled back in a loose braid, wearing a faded dress and old wool stockings, the most beautiful girl Steve had ever seen. “Murch’, shift the pups off the sofa so your friend can sit down.”

“Murch’?” Steve wondered, settling onto the edge of the ‘sofa’—an old wooden chest with a quilt thrown over it and a few misshapen pillows resting on top.

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Mam calls me Murchadh,” he admitted, hauling Alice to her feet and sending her off to “fetch more blankets for the merrow boy, come on Aileesh.” “But who wants to be named _Murchadh_?” he added, and Steve conceded that Bucky had a point there.

Though that mention of Bucky’s Mam, of Mrs. Barnes and her wet, melancholy eyes sent Steve looking around the room for her. Nonie watched him, six years old and still dimpled with a baby’s chub, yet with an ancient, mistrustful gaze, as though frail Steve Rogers might send her rolling off the sofa and out the door.

“She’s not here,” the youngest Barnes finally whispered, her plump lips catching on a childish lisp. “She’s singing to her sisters.”

“She’s at the market,” Becky corrected, sharp enough that even Steve flinched. She narrowed her unsettling brown eyes at her little sister, a warning written across the porcelain of her face. “Near the docks, where they sell the fish for Friday meals, and some of the tea we drink.”

“If fish is for Friday,” Alice muttered, tramping back in and dumping a pile of knitted blankets onto Steve’s lap, “then we have Friday _every day_. Besides, she’s probably on Da’s boat, looking for –”

Alice jumped and fell silent, rubbing her rear end where her brother had laid down a swift, stinging slap, scowling at Bucky and twitching her freckled nose.

“Did you scrub the floors?” he asked her, and Alice scowled harder. “Well, then get to it, and take Nonie with you. Both you whelps chatter more than a dolphin reunited with her pod.”

The two youngest Barneses stomped back out of the room, somehow graceful despite their angry clomping over the old wooden floors.

It grew quieter after that, Bucky munching on slices of the fish he was filleting, tossing the rest into Becky’s soup. Becky did most of the talking, asking Steve about which classes he liked best, and was he scared of Sister Martha and her wooden yardstick, and if he thought Agatha Coughlin in fourth grade was as pretty as everyone said.

Steve thought Agatha’s blond hair and blue eyes couldn’t hold a candle to the strange beauty of the girl sitting across from him or the boy at his side, watching him with wide, unfathomable eyes set in skin as pale as sea froth. He didn’t say that, though. He didn’t think they’d like it much if he did.

Eventually, Bucky walked him home, curling his hand around Steve’s cold fingers and dragging him out of the way to show him the colony of termites he’d found under an old wooden sign. They made it back to Steve’s apartment, finally, Steve giggling and Bucky laughing like a terrier in short, happy barks.

Sarah Rogers had obviously returned from work, gone out shopping and come home again after reading Steve’s note, since she had a basket of oysters ready to hand over to Steve’s new friend.

“We don’t need charity,” Bucky said, eyeing the basket warily, the glint of hunger in brown eyes giving him away. His grip tightened on Steve’s hand, and he cocked his head, listening for something that Steve couldn’t hear.

“Call it an apology, then,” Steve’s Ma said, and Steve frowned. An apology for what? “I would help your mother, if I could. She deserves better.”

Bucky’s lips thinned, his anger a powerful, palpable presence in the room. “And do we deserve to be motherless, then?” he replied, and Steve could sense churning undercurrents in a conversation he couldn’t understand. “Is that fair?”

Sarah Rogers smiled, and ran her thin fingers through Bucky’s perfect hair. Bucky stilled, and Steve had the feeling that no one tended to touch the Barnes children besides each other. “The sea is never fair, lad,” she said, sad but certain, and Bucky swallowed hard and looked away. “But she takes what’s hers, in the end.” She glanced down, to where Bucky was still clutching Steve’s hand, and concern flashed through her eyes before she buried it, offering the basket of oysters once again.

This time Bucky let go of Steve’s hand, accepted the gift—the apology?—and nodded at them both. “We go swimming on Sundays,” he announced, as he let himself out the door. “We could bring Steve, if you don’t mind, ma’am. The ocean air would do him good.”

Steve’s Ma nodded, looking more grateful than Steve thought proper for a dip in the ocean in March. “Isn’t it _freezing_?” he demanded, and caught a flash of Bucky’s pointed white teeth in the answering grin.

“It’s never too cold for a Barnes!” he shouted, a flicker of glee on his face and his words echoing with the slam of the door.

The sea air did do Steve good, and so did the wretched kelp tea that Becky forced on him from the thermos, though no one would explain why. Mrs. Barnes didn’t swim; she wandered down the shore, scaring away the seabirds and singing mournful, foreign songs in a language Steve had never heard, her voice bringing Steve to tears and yet dragging him toward her all the same.

Then Bucky started singing, happy, foolish tunes from the radio, tickling Nonie until she tumbled into the water and joined him, all four kids loud enough to drown out the magnetic sound of their mother’s song. Steve sat on the dry sand, wrapped in blankets, and couldn’t help but smile.

* * *

It took him years to wear his Ma down, ‘til one day she slipped said ‘selkie pups’ when telling Steve to go play at the Barneses while she went to work. By then Nonie was turning eleven and Becky was a teenager, hiding her unearthly beauty under garish lipstick that Bucky used to draw whiskers on her while she slept. And it was all blarney, as Father O’Malley would say, but it explained so much, Mrs. Barnes’s haunting voice and the constant smell of fish in their house, the way no one needed to show Nonie how to swim though she was younger than Steve and twice as round, the thin skin that ran between the kids’ fingers, webbing almost up to the first knuckle that the midwife had failed to completely cut away.

It took Steve another year—sixteen himself and Bucky right behind—to find where George Barnes hid his wife’s skin, locked in a chest and buried out of sight of the water where Maureen Barnes would never go. He’d wanted to tell Bucky first, because he could still see Bucky’s face almost five years ago, asking Sarah Rogers why it wasn’t fair to capture a selkie but it was fair to orphan her pups. But Mrs. Barnes had watched him, of course, quiet and wary like a seal when a human came too near, and she had dived for the skin before Steve had finished opening the chest, clutching it to her face and inhaling the faint odor of musk and seaweed.

“Tell them to listen,” she’d whispered hoarsely, her eyes enormous above the mottled fur of her coat, her long eyelashes clumped with human tears. “I’ll sing to them, when they come.” Then webbed fingers had run briefly through Steve’s hair and gone, vanished off the land and down to the sea where Maureen Barnes had always belonged.

Bucky found him kneeling there, beside the hole in the ground, singing for Steve with a voice no human could resist. “Your Ma’s worried,” he said casually, tossing his sweater around Steve’s thin shoulders, but Steve was watching closely enough to see the twitch of Bucky’s nose, and knew his friend had smelled his mother in the night air.

“I’m sorry,” Steve choked out, grabbing Bucky’s hand and willing him not to be angry, not to hate Steve because he had tried to do the right thing and orphaned his best friend instead. “I didn’t mean for her to –”

Bucky shrugged, leaning over and nudging Steve with his nose the way he did with his sisters, remnants of their mother’s kin in everything they did. “I know,” he said, pretending that he wasn’t clutching too tightly to Steve’s hand. “She was never going to stay.” He ducked his head a little lower, pushing his nose into the hollow under Steve’s cheekbone, tipping Steve’s face up to meet his.

Steve could taste the ocean in Bucky’s tears, in the warmth of his human kiss. He traced the webbing on Bucky’s fingers and licked the salt from his cheeks, grateful that Bucky hadn’t sent him away. Secretly, selfishly grateful that Bucky had been born human, because Steve wasn’t sure if he could have returned Bucky’s skin and let him go.

(But of course, his Ma was right in the end. Selkie or not, skin or no, the sea took what was hers. He kept his eyes closed as the plane exploded—unable to watch Bucky’s body drop like a piece of flaming debris into the English Channel, unable to lose what had never been his to keep. He kept his eyes closed as he fell, so that the last thing he saw was the deep, liquid brown of Bucky’s eyes and the love in his unearthly smile; and the last thing he heard was the echo of a song too beautiful for men to know.)

**Author's Note:**

> Maureen - either means 'bitter' or 'from the bright sea' and so felt appropriate in both regards. George means 'farmer' and Barnes is a homonym, so it seemed right to make him sound land-based and human.
> 
> Murchadh is 'sea warrior,' and Rebecca potentially means 'a snare,' which was probably how Maureen felt about her imprisonment.
> 
> Merrow means merman, but it's also an obsolete word for 'soft, tender, frail, weak,' and so seemed spot-on for selkie-children to use as a way to describe Steve.
> 
> I'm not really sure how it would be at home, since in a lot of the stories the kids don't know that their mother is a selkie, and the Barnes kids clearly do, so I mixed in the terminology for seals (rookery, pups, whelps, etc.) with everything else. Half-selkie children were supposed to be unnaturally beautiful, with seal eyes and webbing between their fingers. I've tossed in some of the siren song mythology as well.


End file.
